St. Martin's Eve: A Novel

by Mrs. Henry Wood

You can take a look at her as she lies. Some few weeks have passed since the sad occurence just related, but there is no visible improvement in her appearance. Her face is wan, thinner than it was then, and dark circles have formed round her eyes. There had been no recurrence of the alarming symptoms from the lungs: indeed, the hurt seemed to have healed itself immediately; but a great deal of fever had supervened, and this had left her in a sad state of weakness. The doctors seemed a little puzzled at this condition of fever and its continuance; some of those around her were not, but knew it for the result of her unhappy state of mind. That consumption had set its seal upon her, there was no longer any doubt, but it was thought probable the disease might linger in its progress.

Rose and Mary were with her still. Adeline could not bear to hear of their leaving. "They must spare you to me until the end," she said, alluding to their friends, and the young ladies seemed quite willing to accept the position. They were her chief companions; the French nurse remained, but her office was partly a sinecure, and just now she was occupied with Madame de Beaufoy, who was confined to her bed with illness. Signor de Castella was in Paris on business--he always seemed to have business on hand, but no one could ever quite find out what it was. Agnes de Beaufoy sat much with her mother. Madame de Castella was almost as ill as Adeline; grieving, fretting, repining continually. She paid frequent visits to Adeline's room, but seldom stayed in it long, for she was apt to suffer her feelings to get ahead, and to become hysterical. A frequent visitor to it was Father Marc; the most cheerful, chatty, pleasant of all. He brought her no end of entertaining anecdotes of the neighbourhood, and sometimes succeeded in winning a smile from her lips. He never entered with her upon religious topics, so far as the two young ladies saw or heard; never appeared to anticipate that the end of life's race was entered upon. Rose had put aside much of her giddy vanity, and they all loved her. She was in bitter repentance for her unnecessary and exaggerated revelations touching Sarah Beauclerc;--there, in her knowledge of that, lay the keenest sting of Adeline's misery. Adeline remained silent as to her inward life, silent as the grave; but something had been gathered of it. She had more than once fallen into a sort of delirium--I don't know any better name for it; partly sleep, partly a talking and waking dream, and some painful thoughts had been spoken in it. It always occurred at the dusk of evening, and Adeline herself seemed unconscious of it when she woke up to reality. You may meet with such a case yourselves; when you do, suspect the patient's state of alarming bodily weakness.

Adeline's former chamber had been changed for one with a southern aspect. The bed was in a recess, as is customary in the country, or rather in a smaller room, for there were windows and two doors in it. A large cheerful chamber, or sitting-room, the chief, the windows lofty, the fireplace handsome, the little Turkey-carpet mats, scattered on the polished floor, of bright colours. Adeline's sofa just now faced the windows; it was light, and could be turned easily any way on its firm castors; Madame de Castella leaned back in an easy-chair, nearly as pale and worn as Adeline; Mary Carr was working; Rose listlessly turned over the leaves of one of the pretty books lying on the large round table.

"Draw aside the curtain, Rose," Adeline said. "The sun has passed."

Rose drew it aside. An hour or so before, the weak, watery sun had come forth from behind the lowering grey clouds and sent his beams straight into Adeline's eyes, so they had shut him out. Diminished in force though the rays were, they were yet too bright for the invalid's sight. Surely, when you come to think of it, there was a singular affinity between the weather and Adeline's health and happiness. Cold, wet, boisterous, and gloomy had it been in the spring, during the time of her long illness, up to the period, within a few days, of her arrival at Beaufoy and commencing intimacy with Frederick St. John; warm, brilliant and beautiful it was all through the months of that intimacy; but with its abrupt termination, the very day subsequent to the miserable one of his departure and of Adeline's dangerous accident, it had abruptly changed, and become cold, wet, dreary again. Weeks, as you have heard, had elapsed since, and the weather still wore the same gloomy aspect, in which there seemed no prospect of amendment on this side winter. A feeling of awe, almost of superstition, would creep over Mary Carr, as she sat by Adeline's bedside in the dim evenings, listening to the moaning, sighing wind, as it swept round the unprotected château and shook off the leaves from the nearly bare trees on the western side. It sounded so like a dirge for the dying girl who was passing from them! The watchers would look up with a shiver, and say how dreary it was, this gloomy weather, and wish it would change, forgetting that the sweetest summer's day, the brightest skies, cannot bring joy to a house where joy exists not, or renew the peace of a heart from which hope has flown. Very fanciful all this, no doubt, you will say; what has the weather to do with events in this busy world of ours? Nothing, of course. Still, it had been a curious year; winter, summer, and now winter again; but neither spring nor autumn.

As Rose drew aside the curtain, humming a scrap of a song at the same time, for she was always gay, and nothing could take it out of her, Adeline left the sofa where she had been lying, and sat down near the fire in any easy-chair of white dimity.

"Mamma," she said, catching sight of Madame de Castella's lifeless, sickly aspect, "why do you not go out? It is not raining today, and the fresh air would do you good."

"Oh, Adeline," sighed the unhappy mother, "nothing will do me good while I see you as you are."

"Now, Madame de Castella!" remonstrated Rose. "You persist in taking a wrong view of things! Adeline is getting better and stronger every day."

True, in a degree. But would it last? Perhaps Rose herself, in her inmost heart, knew that it would not. Madame de Castella rose abruptly, and quitted the room; and Rose gave a shrug to her pretty shoulders. There were times, as she privately confided to Mary Carr, when she could have shaken Madame for her line of conduct. She vented her anger just now on the pillow behind Adeline's back, knocking it unmercifully, under the plea of smoothing it to comfort.